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When the federal budget request for 2018 proposed to eliminate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office, Bay-lovers were alarmed. The EPA’s Bay program is “the glue that holds the state/federal partnership together,” in the analysis of Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Will Baker. EPA program office money is the primary source of support for coordinating, monitoring and modeling progress toward Bay restoration.

Anne Arundel County’s celebration of Maryland Day, officially March 25, shifts to a hopefully sunnier, warmer weekend this year.
April 6 thru 8, we celebrate our shared stake in the territory and body politic planted 384 years ago on March 25, 1634, when Lord Baltimore’s colonists made land on a tiny island in a big river in an unknown world: Maryland Day.

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Over the next 12 days Booth scurried through Southern Maryland and into Virginia, evading his pursuers in the manhunt of the century.
Southern Maryland was familiar territory to Booth, who visited under cover of real estate investment. During the long years of the American Civil War (1861-1865) he built a cadre of co-conspirators whose Confederate sympathies drove them to extreme measures.

In covering the around-the-world Volvo Ocean Race through the years, I met sailing legends who seemed larger than life: Torben Grael, Mike Sanderson, Paul Cayard, Ian Walker and Bouwe Bekking, who is skippering Team Brunel in the current race.
The Volvo Ocean Race is the preeminent physical challenge on earth. It makes climbing Mt. Everest and the Tour de France look like cake walks. The sailors endure danger and tests of endurance that stretch the limits of mere mortals on a daily basis.

Racing into Chesapeake Country this Sunday April 8 are some healthy kids.
Healthy Kids Running Series, a nationwide program, comes to Anne Arundel Community College this month to help kids in the community learn to run their way to good health.
Healthy Kids is a five-week initiative to help combat childhood obesity with fun and education.

Spring is on the calendar. We had another lovely taste of warm weather last week. Yet the forecasters say not to pack away the winter gear as the thermometer struggles to reconcile with our expectations of spring.
Prepare your sacrifices to the weather gods, for as April moves forward, more and more outdoor events call us out of hibernation.
Here’s a look at some of the reasons to pray for warm weather.

The woods behind St. Luke’s Church in Eastport looked pretty natural. But if you’d trained your eye to nature’s ways, you saw a tangle of invasive plants strangling the native trees and shrubs. Deeper in, a 42-inch wide underground pipe drained stormwater along with sediment, ­toxins, pet waste and other unpleasant things from 28 surrounding acres directly into Back Creek.
Not so pretty. Or natural.

Nearly 34 percent of Anne Arundel County young people struggle with food insecurity — having reliable access to sufficient quantities of affordable and nutritious food. Local businesses recently joined forces with the nonprofit group Generosity Feeds to help ease those hunger pangs.

Local students are stepping up, speaking out and marching for a safe education

Shelby Conrad

Right here in Annapolis, students are assembling behind their colleagues in Parkland to speak up for their right to a safe education.
Mackenzie Boughey, a sophomore at the Severn School in Severna Park, watched with rising unease as the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, overwhelmed television and social media. First she felt horror. Then inspiration.

The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, have a patron saint to inspire them as they reconstruct their terror and grief into a national cause, rallying students around the country to end gun violence. Their school’s namesake was a champion for social justice activism for most of her long life.
In her greatest achievement, she also has an intimate connection to Chesapeake Country, where our own students March for Our Lives on Saturday, March 24.